Minggu, 25 September 2016

The Way We Pray Is the Way We Lead

The Way We Pray Is the Way We Lead

There is an ancient Latin rule of the church that reads: lex orandi lex credendi,
“the law of praying is the law of believing.” Or to put it into a
slightly different vernacular, “the way that we pray is the way that we
believe.”
In other words, our theology is not merely a confession of agreement
with an orthodox list of beliefs. Our beliefs about God are manifest and
even cultivated by our communion with God.
So often theology is used as a kind of litmus test that we pass in
order to get to the place of doing something for God. So if we believe
the right things about God, then we are qualified to work for him. And
as a result, it seems that theology has little to do with what we do in
the church outside of that which we preach or teach.
In other words, theology is foundational to things like leadership
and the running of the church, but we don’t see how it is relevant to
what we do when we walk into the church office on Monday morning or what
we do as a church council on Wednesday night.
So on Sunday morning, we pray that God will help us to believe,
because we know that we depend upon God to do what only he can do in the
transformation of lives. But do we pray in the same way on Monday
morning? Or during a council meeting?
But belief is not merely about a list of theological facts.
Theological belief is about life, all of life. We could state it like
this: The way that we pray is the way that we work. Or the way that we
pray is the way that we parent. Or maybe still: the way that the pray is
the way that we play.
The way that we pray as leaders in the church is the way that we lead.
The way that we pray as we lead the church reveals what we believe
about how God leads the church. Recently, I surveyed about 25 books from
the last two decades that are commonly considered to be some of the
best on the topic of church leadership. It is remarkable how little ink
was used to talk about the relationship between prayer and leadership.
Endless pages spent on the crisis that we face in the church. Strategies
upon strategies outline five ways to make your church outreach
oriented, eight steps to church transformation, six patterns for the
church of the future, etc.
But prayer is in most cases virtually absent.
And where it is present, it is tucked away and presented as if this
is something that we already know how to do. Or the focus lies on
praying that God will help us live up to his or her full potential as a
leader.
The way we pray is the way we lead.
Too often we pray by offering words up to God as a transaction. God
did his part on the cross and in the resurrection. Now we pray that God
will help us do our part. We are saved by grace, by the miracle of the
work that only God can do. Church leadership is about our efforts, our
strategies and our skills. Prayer is something that we do so that we
might be as good a leader as possible.
We know that we need God when we preach, when we serve communion or
during an altar call. But the rest of our leadership seems to fall back
on us to pull off.
Church leadership gets thrown back upon us. It is something that we
must accomplish for the sake of God’s work. And those of us who are not
“great” leaders—which is most of us—read the books by those who
are—which is very few—and we try to figure out how to become like them.
(Maybe I’m the only one who has done this, and if so, then ignore this.)
I’m no longer interested in trying to lead like those who get the
most done for God. I don’t want to implement a list of leadership habits
or laws. I’m not sure that God is that interested in my ability to be a
great leader.
Paul confessed to the church at Philippi:The very credentials these people are waving around as something
special, I’m tearing up and throwing out with the trash—along with
everything else I used to take credit for. And why? Because of Christ.
Yes, all the things I once thought were so important are gone from my
life. Compared to the high privilege of knowing Christ Jesus as my
Master, firsthand, everything I once thought I had going for me is
insignificant—dog dung. I’ve dumped it all in the trash so that I could
embrace Christ and be embraced by him. I didn’t want some petty,
inferior brand of righteousness that comes from keeping a list of rules
when I could get the robust kind that comes from trusting Christ—God’s
righteousness. I gave up all that inferior stuff so I could know Christ
personally, experience his resurrection power, be a partner in his
suffering and go all the way with him to death itself. If there was any
way to get in on the resurrection from the dead, I wanted to do it.
(Phil 3:7-11, The Message)
What might it mean to talk about leadership within this frame of
reference? What might it mean to see our leadership prowess as mere
“dung” in comparison to knowing Christ, to embrace Christ and being
embraced by him? How might that mindset change the way we lead?
The way we pray is the way we lead. We can focus on getting stuff
done for God and that’s what we will “know.” We will be embraced by
activities that accomplish something because that’s what we embrace. Or
we can know God in the midst of our leadership.
And this can be part of the life of a leader on Monday mornings and
during council meetings just as much, if not more, than on Sundays.